EMPOWER ’22: Simmons ‘humbled’ to be given Roy Fish Award

IRVING—Joe Simmons, who served as an evangelism consultant for the Southern Baptists of Texas Convention for 12 years, was given the Roy Fish Lifetime Achievement Award for Vocational Evangelism during the Tuesday afternoon session of the convention’s 2022 Empower Conference.

The Fish award was inaugurated in 2006 and is named for the late Roy Fish, a well-known and influential evangelism professor at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary for nearly 50 years.

“I’m unworthy of this,” Simmons said. “I’m just a guy who worked on the crusades. I’m very humbled about this. I’m grateful to God for this.”

Simmons was a layman at Sagemont Church in Houston, a former coach working for the power company, when Sagemont’s pastor, John Morgan, introduced him to evangelist James Robison in the 1970s. They become friends and he went on to work with Robison directing crusades all over the country for about 20 years.

“Our ministry started off really small. And then it got really big,” Simmons said. “We saw more people saved than through any other ministry, besides Billy Graham. We were doing 12 citywide crusades a year and 50 one-night rallies. Five or six-thousand people at a time would respond to the gospel invitation during these citywide crusades. We’d come into a county and then that county would lead the state in baptisms for the year.”

He also worked with Bailey Smith and his Real Evangelism organization before being asked to help SBTC with event evangelism.

“Joe Simmons has been a great example of a lay person who serves the Lord faithfully,” said SBTC Executive Director Nathan Lorick, who worked with Simmons when Lorick was evangelism director for the convention. “God has used him in incredible ways to advance the kingdom. His heart and passion for evangelism is contagious.  We are honored to recognize Joe for his lifelong pursuit of seeing people come to Christ.”

At 81 years old, Simmons is still passionate about evangelism and grieves to see churches neglecting this essential work. “I don’t understand how you can be a pastor, a student of the Bible, and not know that your major responsibility is to win the lost to Christ,” he said. He sees vocational evangelists as “God’s gift to the churches” for the God-given mandate to reach the lost.

Simmons and his wife, Linda, have been married for 60 years and have three sons and three grandchildren.